GekkoScience Compac F

Overview

The GekkoScience Compac F is the best-known USB stick miner — a tiny ASIC on a USB-stick-sized board that plugs into a powered USB hub and mines at around 0.2-0.4 TH/s. It's a long-standing favorite among mining hobbyists and tinkerers who want the smallest, most old-school form of solo mining. Rather than a plug-and-play box, it's a component you configure and run with mining software, often in clusters plugged into a powered hub.

The Compac F's appeal is entirely hobbyist. It's a fun, low-power way to experiment with mining, learn how mining software and pools work, and tinker with tuning and clustering multiple sticks. Because each stick draws little power and produces little heat, you can run one on a desk or gang several together on a good powered hub. It has a dedicated community and plenty of documentation for the tweak-inclined.

The honest reality: at fractions of a terahash, this is a curiosity, not income — even more so than a Bitaxe. The expected value of solo-mining with a Compac F against today's network is negligible, and it requires more fiddling (a powered hub, mining software, configuration) than a self-contained miner. It's for people who enjoy the process — the tinkering, the clustering, the learning — not for anyone chasing returns or wanting a simple plug-in device. Buy the Compac F if you specifically want the classic USB stick-miner experience; for a more capable, self-contained solo miner, a Bitaxe is the better modern choice.